ECE 411

COMPUTER ORGANIZATION AND DESIGN

Spring 2018

Course Objectives

This course is an intensive introduction to the fundamentals of computer
architecture. Relying heavily upon the elementary principles taught in
ECE 290 and ECE 391, we will discuss the basic design, or architecture,
of computing hardware. Computer systems involve architecture design at
many levels. We will focus on the instruction set architecture (ISA)
level (the interface between the software and computing hardware) and the
microarchitecture level (the computing hardware itself). We will examine
to some extent, the level above the instruction set (the programming
language level) and the level below the microarchitecture (the logic gate
level) in order to deepen our understanding of computing systems. This
course has a demanding design component; you will implement some of the
basic concepts presented in lecture using real hardware design tools.